Drawing the global color line

¶ … Global Color Line is a book that is a groundbreaking description of the international making of whiteness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I think it is a work extraordinary both for its global extensiveness and for its sensitivity to local individuality, it is a model for the new global history. The authors, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds skillfully and creatively rebuild how leading European specialists and policymakers in Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Great Britain disputed requests for cultural correspondence and mutually conceived new doctrines of racial superiority to justify the conservation and, in some situations, the reinvigoration of white advantage in all parts of the world that England either constrained or in which it had once set its settlers. Through my experience in reading the book, I found it to be an effective and sobering historical record, intelligently and sophisticatedly told.

One of the first things that stood out to me was how the authors used W.E.B Dubois to make a valid point. It was fascinating how Lake and Reynolds brought to light that how in the early 1900s; Dubois made a remarkable prophesy about color. He predicted that the color line would be a significant issue of the twentieth-century and then went on to point out one of its intrinsic dynamics. I basically, interpreted it to be the new faith of whiteness that was unquestionably sweeping all over the world.

I was intrigued about how the author's explained the White Australia Policy, which was a policy I never knew existed before reading the book. This whole situation that started this code of segregation was started when Australia's first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, emerged to address in support of the Immigration Restriction Bill in August 1901, he detained a loft copy of National Life and Character: A Forecast, a book printed eight years previously by Melbourne philosopher Charles Pearson. The book had already accumulated a lot of international fans. I was surprised to learn that one of these fans would require Theodore Roosevelt President-elect of the United States.

In fact, across the Pacific there was a joint recognition of ideas on race, with the architects of the White Australia Policy being heavily influenced in turn by the works of an expert on American race relations, James Bryce I thought it was enthralling to point out that while most historians have restricted their findings of race-relations to a national structure, this book proposes a comprehensive study of the multinational movement of people. To start with, Lake and Reynolds did a superb job in my mind when relating, the trans-Pacific trade of racial ideas. These were dated all the way back to the Californian and Victorian gold rush era in the late 1840s and 50s. It was fascinating to learn that at the same time, there were inconsistent fears on the rise regarding ethical, clean and racial effects of uncontrolled Chinese migration.

Later on in the book, Lake and Reynolds went a step further in showing how the same kind of racial panic appeared in other areas of the world such as Natal after the import of indentured Indian labor to toil in the sugar industry. The authors did a thorough job with presenting how in each case, the villains were recognized as primarily British-based exploiters of colonial fascinations, who were previously to blame for the slave trade which had poisoned the American democracy with the ugly heritage of the 'Negro question'. I thought that the authors made it exceedingly clear in the book that having been deprived of slave labor, the British then turned to an equally disturbing practice of indentured labor. This new abomination of humanity gave an sudden threat to European wages and an enduring threat to colonial white rule (Reynolds). I thought that the book showed the thought-provoking process of how when colonial lawmaking organizations hit back by struggling to prevent immigrants, or by rejecting to publicize the rights of residency on the grounds of race, they stumbled upon objection from the British imposing interests.

I learned that in response to all of that, British colonists hired a strategy fostered in the American South. The authors did an in-depth job depicting this policy by first showing us that the Cape and then Natal accepted the Mississippi Literacy Test as a means of prohibiting, and it was this test that transformed into the infamous Dictation Test that powers that be employed to exploit the White Australia policy.

Other things that caught my attention in the book was learning that the downfall of the Russian Imperial navy by the Japanese in 1905 further reinforced the partnership between advocates of the color line in the United States and those in the British Territories. It was even more attractive to understand that when President Roosevelt sent off an impressive American battle fleet to the Pacific to show off their strength, Alfred Deakin personally asked Roosevelt to send 'the great white navy' to Australia to establish Anglo-Saxon cooperation in the face of the Asiatic danger. I thought that the authors showed full consideration of how this incredible union achieved its most memorable achievement. This happened when old associates from the United States at the League of Nations functioned behind the settings to influence success for Prime Minister Billy Hughes's repeated refusal to approve a clause acknowledging the fairness of races to be entered into the charter (Reynolds). This was an event which I think ruthlessly embarrassed the British Regime and exasperated their wartime ally the Japanese.